


you've got paper bones (& a matchstick heart)

by Victorian_Asylum



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-14
Updated: 2015-01-14
Packaged: 2018-03-07 12:39:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,296
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3173982
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Victorian_Asylum/pseuds/Victorian_Asylum
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Your mother taught you many things, but she never taught you this / Post destroy ending, a snapshot of Shepard and Liara's recovery/ References Indoctrination Theory</p>
            </blockquote>





	you've got paper bones (& a matchstick heart)

**Author's Note:**

> You know what, who even cares about writing heartfelt, fluffy fics, anyway?
> 
> I wanted to do a post ME3 story, stretch my comfort zone in terms of length, and it kind of went downhill from there. So here we are.

The apartment you move into after Shepard is released from the hospital is an expensive, luxurious suite, one of the best still left standing in the recovering cities of earth. It was never intended to be permanent, but your apartment on Illium had been razed, and the one Anderson awarded Shepard on the Citadel has perished, so it must work. Shepard would have protested such expenses, but the woman has saved the entire galaxy, survived the theoretically impossible, and you'll be damned if she isn't rewarded in some manner. Through the last vestiges of your recovering network, you have managed to procure guards who stand watch around every feasible entrance to the complex, have every person entering screened and checked, and only allow a select few in to see Shepard. Even after being cleared from the hospital, the woman still remains in a delicate mental state. Seeing her friends is exhausting in and of itself. Encountering the billions clamoring to kiss the ground she walks on would simply be too much.

The only person who makes routine visits is Dr. Chakwas, with her periodic checkups to ensure the injuries are healing properly. The rest of the Normandy crew has since gone on to help the rebuilding effort, both on earth and throughout the systems. You can only imagine their inevitable drafts of disappointment at the state of their leader and friend. Shepard barely speaks in the beginning. Not once has she mentioned the events inside the Citadel. You cannot fathom even the slightest inkling of an idea as to how everything played out, and you wonder if you ever want such knowledge.

Every day is measured in seconds now. Shepard spends every waking and sleeping moment for three months in bed. It is hard for you, to see her waste away inside the confines of soft linen sheets. She shrinks before your very eyes, curled beneath pillows and blankets and trapped inside of herself. She awakens multiple times through the day and night, torn from nightmares with screams in her throat and tears in her eyes, thrashing her arms and fighting a phantom that exists beyond the reach of your fingers. It never seems to work, when you try to pull her back into reality, but you try anyway, hold her through the earthquakes of the aftermath and hope they don't topple the progress she has built. You cannot measure if she is trapped in the past, the present, or a nonexistent reality. Sometimes she recognizes you, her relief like rain in a scorched desert. Other times, you are a remnant of her darkest memories, something vile or someone she couldn't save or someone to torment her soul. The worst times of all are when she imagines things that have never come to pass, the images so visceral to her it burns. Sometimes she is dead, existing in a state of pure nothingness. It is rather frequent in the first few weeks. Other times, she seem trapped in a future where the Reapers have won, conquering the Milky Way system by system, and crushing everything in their paths. In those, she never seems to be herself, only some helpless sole at the end of everything, beaten and broken and awaiting the perfect annihilation of all things.

You are so far out of your depths it would be laughable, were the situation not the way it is. Perhaps you should have studied less history and more psychology, but you doubt it would have made a difference. Shepard is the first and last person to suffer such as this, and all the brightest minds and current medicine could not fit everything perfectly together again. So you simply do what you can. You dress her wounds, change her clothes, give her her medication and ensure she eats. You are careful and tender when you bathe her, but the warm water seems to appease her demons, for Shepard unwinds inside the confines of the tub, waiting for the water to wash away her sins. She is never as small in the real world as she is when she submerges her body, and you wonder if it means anything, but thank the Goddess none the less that there is something that seems to help.

After, Shepard sits on the edge of the tub, a skeleton of a thing, drenched and shivering despite the towels secured over her body. You towel off the mangy, curled mess that has become her hair, uncut since her hospitalization and so tangled it was no longer possible to salvage. It needs to be cut, but you refuse to buzz her hair until she gives permission. When you finish, you swathe her in thick, baggy clothes that hang from her withering frame and try not hurt so much at the sight. Shepard curls up in bed and appears to fall asleep, so you head for your office to monitor your network, nursing a glass of scotch as you sort through reports and briefings and track the progress of the galaxy. A few hours later, when the time has reached an unreasonable hour, you return to the bedroom and nearly start at the sight.

Shepard is curled on the floor beneath the fish tank, legs drawn up beneath her, head pressed against the tile, fingers scraping along the side of her head. She rocks back and forth uttering nonsense under her breath. You rush to her, falling to your knees and reaching at her. “Shepard,” you call, fingers brushing her spine.

Shepard stops, slowly releases her head. Her fingertips are bloody, you realize, and blood drips down the side of her head. She looks at you with a wet face, eyes 10,000 years older. “Can you hear the hum?”

“Hum?” You echo. “You mean the tank?” This is the first sentence she's spoken since the defeat of the Reapers. You heart thrums in both excitement and trepidation.

“No,” she breathes. “Them. That grating, guttural, mechanical growl. It's in my head, always in my head. Words likes nail across metal. Scratching, scratching. Whispers, sweet as honey, thick as tar. 'Control,' they say. 'Control us.' Lies. Fucking liars. 'Destroy, destroy, destroy' my heart says. Heavy. Red.” Her lips tremble and her eyes glisten. You take hold of her hands, brush thumbs over scarred knuckles. “I didn't mean it. I had no choice. They lied. I didn't want to kill them. I shouldn't have killed them.”

You want to ask for clarification, but fear pushing her too far, or breathing life into unpleasant memories. You knew, after a moment of deliberation, that Shepard was referring to the Citadel. Everyone had seen an eerie red in the sky, something akin to the human northern lights, and it had spreed rapidly, engulfing the Reapers in crimson static and effectively ruining them. Reports from ships in space indicated it originated from the Citadel, after Shepard had gone up. And kill whom, exactly? The casualties in the aftermath had only been AIs, which suffered the same irreversible fate as the Reapers under the assault of the red energy. But Shepard did not know this. You did not wish to tell her until she was in a more fortified mental state. So how could she know? Unless... she caused such a thing. Which would mean she was conscious of her actions, and had a choice. Her word indicated the events at the Citadel had been much more complicated than simply activating the Crucible. Had she made the best choice, or the most convenient? You mentally chastise yourself. You shouldn't assume. Instead, you say, “Shepard, it's alright. The Reapers are gone. We've won.”

She looks at you with those too old eyes, and says nothing. You need to address the fresh wounds on her head, but a mane of hair bars your way. “Shepard, your hair is getting too long to manage. May I cut it?”

She nods mutely, and after a pause, you guide her back to the bathroom. You tackle the mess with scissors first, hacking away uneven chunks until it is short enough to not bother the clippers. From there you make short work of the rest of her hair, and when she has a fresh buzzed head she looks more like the woman you met all those years ago. The image is so jarring you nearly drop the clippers. It seems so far away, though it's hardly been five years. You're both so startlingly different it leaves you breathless. There's blood and scars and stitches and antiseptic and so many sleepless nights between who you both were before and who you are now. The inevitability of it was terrifying, and it's hard to look at now. How you both kind of ignored it for the longest time, glued pictures over all the parts of you that couldn't be brutalized back into place. Didn't admit that people changed, and the people caught up in the most momentous event in all history were the ones continually broken down, pieced back together with new parts, then had the whole process repeated until they were one mess of different parts of others' hearts and dreams and failures.

And now, you suppose, the pair of you are strangers that need to be introduced again and watered so the seeds of your relationship can bloom again without the Reaper's shade strangling it all. 

That night Shepard is the one who holds you close, hands on your hips, your head tucked beneath her chin, nose against her throat. The position is so painfully familiar, as if nothing has changed, and if you open your eyes stars will be passing idly by above and around the Normandy. You almost breakdown in tears, and think, for the first time, that maybe you need healing too. That maybe the only reason you can still manage is because you haven't stopped, not once. Just compartmentalized and prioritized like you knew how, like you were good at, and left every rotten thing to fester in some toxic, deadly brew.

So, the next morning brings a fresh start and hot coffee. It's a beginning, the first you've had in years since everything began to end. You haven't actually had a beginning, not since the day you were born. Your life blurred events together, melting wax, one long, continuous string of studying and work and books and Protheans. You never made mistakes, because everything was so close, you couldn't afford it. Then Shepard came along, blew proportions up to the size of the galaxy, and suddenly mistakes seemed to work their way into your hands a little easier. A little falter here, a loss of focus there. And for the first time, you felt time as all others do, it was real, no longer some intangible concept. You could taste it, measured it, and were aware, then, of its finite existence, of a bitter end descending.

Now, it seems, you've lost your internal devices, for time no longer means anything. It's been shattered for you, and you wish you could find all the pieces, because it is something beyond a miracle that Shepard is alive, and any day she is breathing is a day you cherish, for you are with her to the end, and you don't know when she will end. When she will simply cease. You'll still be young, face untouched. Shepard could be 80, she could die tomorrow. You've no more guarantee of her life now then you had in pursuit of the Reapers. It is unfair, but no amount of cursing at the stars can change that. Change this. So you choose to forget as best as you can.

Dr. Chakwas visits in the month that follows, but you do not mention the incident. Shepard seems to be recovered physically, which is no small blessing. She slowly falls back into her old self, speaking more often, in bigger sentences, until you can almost see the woman she was before, hidden somewhere behind the shadows of her eyes. You decide to see a therapist, and, after a week of deliberation, Shepard agrees too. It's all a separate affair. You both find it better that way. Easier. Neither of you are ready to fully talk about it. Two and a half months after the sessions start, and things begin to fall towards a more familiar rhythm. Shepard's sleeping habits even out, and she starts physical therapy to ease back into the swing of things. She lost a startling amount of weight and muscle mass. But, Shepard is still not of the proper state to venture outside the suite, so everything is conducted indoors.

You sit at your desk, watching a video Tali sent you with updates on the status of Rannoch. Construction was coming along nicely, though they were years away from being able to walk without suits like their ancestors did. Houses were starting to be built, now that the prototype with proper filtration systems had proven successful. The Quarians were finally reclaiming their home world. You smile as Tali bids you and Shepard goodbye, with a wish of good luck.

“Do they ever visit?” Shepard's husked voice startles you and you turn slightly. She is swallowed up by her clothes, hanging off her like she were made of bones and empty spaces. She is still as tall as she ever was, but presents herself so horridly small it hurts to look at. To see someone so big hollowed out so. Her hair look much like it did during the final push against the Reapers, a short halo of messy curls that looks so foreign on her haunted face, so hesitant and loud with its unbelonging. Nothing really suits her wounded face, contorted with sadness and ravenous guilt, not even the scar that cuts a wobbly line down her cheek and over her lips, or her crooked nose, angled to the side, once broken and never properly fixed.

“In the beginning, yes,” you reply, carefully, slowly. “But as soon as they were able, they had to return to their homeworlds, to rebuild.” They couldn't bear to see their Commander in such a state. But Shepard needn't know that. And if she already did, she does not need to be reminded. 

“Will you return to Thessia?”

“Perhaps one day. But I can oversee the rebuilding from here. Besides,” you add, after a moment's deliberation. “There are things here that must be rebuilt, and I must be there for them.”

Shepard nods at that, swallows the words, before you shut down the monitor, and you both go to bed. You move to turn off the lights, but Shepard stop you with a soft hand at the hem of your shirt. Her eyes hold a silent question, then, she says something physical. “I need to see.” And you understand, grant permission, and her cold hands are lifting up your shirt and laying it on the bed like it were glass. You do not have many scars upon your body. But the most glaring is an atlas of puckered, light flesh along your right side, small continents carved out on your skin. This was the wound that ended your desperate dash to the Conduit beside Shepard. This was the wound that saved you from annihilation at the end of Harbinger's beam.

Shepard traces the wound with all the reverence of a cartographer, like a god in awe of its own creation. Cold fingers settle over the space between your ribs, kiss the divots and dips. This was the physical price you paid to destroy the Reapers. You gave blood, broke parts of yourself, as all who fought did. And it was enough. By the goddess, it was somehow enough. You watch the concentration etched in the lines between Shepard's eyebrows, thoughts churning within her head. She hadn't seen it, not since that fateful, galaxy shattering day. When you thought, like bullets in your stomach, that you would lose this woman. Lose her for eternity. Even to dwell on the memory, still so vividly emotional, starts your heart skipping heavy beats, so you gently reverse the worship, see to it that Shepard's scars are laid bare beneath the lamplight.

She's more new, raised skin than old. More injury than human. If scars were stories, then Shepard were surely be an enigma among novels. In all the years you had known her, she never showed herself to be self conscious of her growing collections of wounds. Never hid nor acknowledged them. But looking at her now brought an ache to your bones. She was hauntingly beautiful, dark skin hidden under heavy splotches of lightened scars that fell across her body with reckless abandon. Even old stories are hidden under newer, redder wounds. You cannot begin to imagine how she survived this. How her body did not simply cease to be, ligaments and muscles dissolving into stardust and elements, salt of the earth feeding the galaxy with her blood like the nectar of gods. Either providence kissed her heels, or she had transcended humanity entirely, a deity among mortals.

But, no, you cannot allow yourself to think of her like that. Shepard simply is, a puzzle unto itself, and you do not have the luxury of piecing such a thing together. She exists in the same space as you, and that is all that you need.

Shepard watches you with a look akin to predatory, calculating and deciphering. And you have been staring at a spot above her naval while engaged in your own thoughts and blink. “Look at us,” you find yourself saying, to fill the silence. To hear her voice, after so long without it. “What a pair we are.”

“A pair of relics, perhaps,” Shepard attempts her old, casual humor. It's dusty and cracked around the edges, but you can fall into this kind of familiarity. “The couple that saves together stay together, I suppose.”

You manage a smile at that. Before, it would have been riotously funny, the kind of stupid joke that would have your sides splitting with laughter at the absurdity of it. You wonder if life will hold the humor it once had, with the veil between peace and destruction pressed so thin and stretched across your eyes. A causality of war, you think. Whether KIA or MIA, you can only wait and see. You run your palm across Shepard's stomach, feel it flex beneath your touch, a remnant of past musculature still coiling under the skin. You do not know what Shepard looked like, when they found her. Perhaps only a marginal degree better than when her body was recovered after the Collector attack. Still whole, or, maybe partially whole. A shattered skeletal system, wrecked nerves, decimated organs. More corpse than anything else. But miraculously alive, for the moment. What was it that you said to Shepard on the SR1, all those lifetime ago? That the Cipher would have destroyed a lesser mind? You are certain what Shepard had gone through would have utterly destroyed a lesser being.

Is this what healing feels like? You've never had to stitch yourself together before.

“I never thought it would feel so empty,” Shepard admits. “Afterward. Victory is so hollow. Like breathing in space.”

“It will fill in, in time.” You say, trace a scar above her heart, slow beats beneath your touch. “We will fill in, we will grow anew.”

“I was so scared, then,” Shepard says suddenly.

“When you raced to the Conduit? Or inside the Citadel?” You ask for clarification, but her eyes have grown distant, as if she is reliving a memory, and you know the moment is over. You settle into the bed soon after and Shepard follows suit, head against your stomach, tangled in the sheets like vines. If this was healing, you suppose you could get used to it. It felt a lot like ripping stitches, you can feel parts of the connection inside, still strung through your skin. One day, perhaps, it will be too strong to break, and things will have mended enough to back to the way they were. Or at least as close to before as possible. You know nothing could be the same. It was progress at least, and you breath easier for it.

A few days later, you receive an invitation to coffee with Dr. Chakwas. Surprising, but you could do for some fresh air. After playing with the time, you work it out for a day when Shepard is scheduled to meet with the therapist. The city has been slowly resuscitating itself. It was amazing what people could accomplish when they worked together. The street you walk has been mostly cleared of rubble, and shops have been coming to life within newly restructured buildings. Inside the cafe, filled with workers and displaced refugees, those who have slowly come back to their city, or what was left, you stop at the table Chakwas resides in, and pause, surprised at the face beside her. “Miranda,” you say, taking a seat. “It's good to see you. I wasn't expecting you here.”

“I was in the area,” she answers, running a thumb over her mug. She's aged quite a bit in such a short time. Gracefully, as expected, but she does not appear as put together as before. Mouth pulls down into a near imperceptible frown, slight circles beneath heavy eyes which belie a thousand inner workings within her mind. She has always held herself with self worth, a woman of great importance, you could always tell she was working on vital things by the way she stood, sure-footed and tall. But now, she had the body language many had adopted, shoulders held in a way that told you she had seen more than her lifetime would have allowed. That she had been on more than the front lines, she had been the spearhead of the endeavor. Her hands and actions helped shape the future. It was not a burden one carries lightly, but she managed to do so gracefully. “I wanted to visit.”

“How have you been?”

“Better, I suppose,” Miranda says, takes a drink. “I've been sorting through the mess that is Cerberus. All those resources the Illusive Man had at his disposal? Surely they can be used to rebuild. Now it's a matter of purging all agents loyal to the Illusive man, and sending the ones with good intentions to work on useful things.” She shakes her head. “Easier said than done.”

“No small task.” Dr. Chakwas says.

“How is Shepard?” Miranda asks.

“Improving. She's speaking now, her sleeping schedule has straightened out. She is seeing a therapist, and it seems to be helping her sort through everything. She's healing. But I don't believe she is ready to handle going out yet. Not that many people, anyway.”

“And has she...” Dr. Chakwas hesitates. “Has she mentioned what happened after she went into the Conduit?”

You pause, swallow, look away as you stall. This information is not yours to give. You know everyone wants answers, answers you just barely have. Even you cannot fully slate your curiosity. After all, the events inside the Citadel not only stopped the Reapers, they also caused the deaths of all Geth, as well as EDI. For now, people are content to believe it was simply the Crucible. That once Shepard activated it, the rest was out of her hands. Which, now, you know to be false. And people are beginning to suspect this as well. But only Shepard can give this knowledge, if she chooses to. You will not make that decision for her, even it you never receive any answers. “No. She hasn't. Only vague mentions of the event, but nothing concrete.” You lie.

After that, the conversation turns to lighter things as everyone catches up, fills each other in on recent events. It's nice to just stop, breath and talk. Like the old days on the Normandy, or at the party, when, for once in quite a few long years, the crew could stop and relax without throwing their lives into a meat grinder day in and day out. And now, with the Reapers gone, this was normal. This was not an odd day out. It was safety and security. It was peace. And it was far sweeter than you remember. Eventually, you bid them both farewell, heart lighter than it has been in months and return home. That night, after dinner, as you settled in for bed, Shepard suddenly is atop you, legs straddling your hips, just sitting back on her heels, hair damp from a shower, watching you. “I love you.” She says.

You turn your head slightly and look at her, sitting there intently, chest heaving with heavy breaths. She looks very concerned. Every word is vital, as if she must deliver them, no matter what may come. “I know. I love you too.”

“Even after everything I have done?”

“Done? What do you mean? Shepard, you have not done anything, except save the galaxy.”

Shepard's lip trembles, and she flexes her hands anxiously, unsure of where to put them. Of how to exist in this moment, how to be. She is unsure of herself, of how to conduct herself. If she should sow what she is about to say into the fabric of time. “No, I have done so much.”

“Shepard, I don't understand.” She is starting to scare you. What has gotten her so worked up?

“The Geth. They are all dead. I wiped them out. I made that choice. It was all on me. Everything, always on me.”

“Shepard, what do you mean? The Crucible killed the Geth when it fired. It didn't differentiate between them and other sentient machines.”

“No, Liara,” Shepard breathes, the way she says your name brokering shivers across your spine. So broken and needy, a plea on quivering breath. “I had a choice. It was me. The Catalyst was the Citadel, I found it, and I spoke with it. It gave me three choices. But it was lying. I know, because I've heard the Reapers before. Whispering in my mind. And they sounded like that. Only one choice could be truth. I made the choice. I knew. And I sacrificed them all. It's my fault, don't you see?”

“Wait, what do you mean you heard them?” Your heart stops, and forcibly restarts itself somewhere inside your stomach. “Did they-” Your voice catches in your throat. “Did they indoctrinate you?”

“They tried. I resisted. I always resisted, like they said I would. I fought them, but I could always hear them. They tried, they were succeeding. But I won. I had to win.” Shepard pauses, scratches at her temple and closes her eyes, leaning her head back as if listening to the cluttered music of the Reapers. The raw dissonance of their cracked key voices. “They will never have me.”

“Shepard, by the goddess, why didn't you tell us?” You sit up then, gather Shepard into your arms and cradle her, desperate arms encompassing her withering frame. You feel her shudder against you, then fall slack. The realization then, the gears aligning, all falling into place, the knowledge of how close your were to losing here, even when you could feel her asleep beside you, is jarring. No, more than that. Jarring suggests mild discomfort. Something startling, but the discomfort ebbs. This, this was positively devastating, like the glassing of a planet, that Shepard struggled and agonized and felt her mind losing itself along the way for years right in front of you and yet you did not see. Your lungs turn to burning iron inside your ribs, useless things that ache, but do not breath.

You promised yourself a long time ago that you would cry no more. But you've broken promises before. And you are hardly who you were before. You have shed countless skins, grown anew into powerful new beings that would make your old selves quiver in fear. Neither of you are the same people who met inside that ruin. Perhaps somewhere deep inside there are the people you both were on that day, glittering and smiling, so full of youthful promise, trapped within a moment no one will ever touch again. But it is buried beneath bone fragments and genocides and a thousand horrid decisions that break backs and fingers, taste like ashes on tongues unused to asking for help. What happened to us? Well, you know the answer. War, war, war, the only song ever sung. The only blood ever spilled. The only friend ever buried. You knew what happened to people like you. People like her. You were cemented in history, while she was burned into the heavens. Stars whisper her name. So what use were promises, when the person who made them wasn't even you anymore?

So you do cry, something fresh and intricately broken plucking at your vocal cords with heavy hands. It's less of a release and more of an implosion, something subtle and small, that collapses all your internal framework that has been struggling until now. Shepard, for her part, puts an awkward arm around you, rest a hand on your lower back, once able to calm so many, now unable to do anything, and you realize she has as little of an idea as you of how to grow something between the ruins of you both. New territory seems to be all you can survey, every landmark and dogeared book turned to ash. There will be no finding your way home, because there is no home left, for either of you. You'll have to make one, out of here or out of each other. You're out of words to say so you cry until you don't and fall asleep with Shepard encompassed in your arms.

The following morning, you find Shepard standing in front of one of your many displays, arms folded self consciously across her stomach. She is staring at the melted chest piece of her armor, tucked safely away behind clean glass, suspended in time and a soft blue glow. She looks contemplative, and rather unsure, so you say, “It's rather miraculous, that your armor and shields managed to protect you from most of the blast.”

Shepard makes a vaguely responsive noise, glances over her shoulder briefly to meet your eyes, then turns back and says, “I don't know what to do. I'm still technically in the Alliance on extended leave, but I've more than earned an honorable discharge if I desire. Military life is all I've ever known, but I don't know if I want to go back. If I can go back.”

“No one is asking anything of you Shepard. You don't have to make that decision right now.”

“No. But even if I leave, I'll never truly escape it. The Alliance will always want something from me. And I've never functioned as a civilian before. The thought scares me, I don't like being purposeless.”

You make your way over, lay a hand on her arm. “You're functioning as a civilian now. And you're doing just fine. There are countless purposes for you too. Like, woodcarving, for instance.”

“Woodcarving?” Shepard echoes, a hint of a laugh coloring her voice.

“I heard it can be very therapeutic.”

Shepard smiles then, the charming kind that helped you fall in love with her in the first place, and the nostalgia of it nearly knocks you off your feet. Shepard seems to store away her thoughts for the moment, because she takes your hands and leads you away, angling her head towards the bedroom. “How about a movie night?”

A movie night. The sentence is foreign to you for a good few moments, until you remember that yes, this is what people do, now that the world is not caving in and the future is gold as the sun and the stars. This is normal. This is fun. This is domestic, and goddess knows you could use a break. So you nod and follow her, and somehow you both end up on the floor in front of the bed, swathed in bed sheets cocooned around you and over your heads, some action movie you suppose is meant to be heartstopping flowing on the screen, though you are no longer paying it any attention. Shepard rolls onto her elbows, perched halfway over you, and wonders, “Do you think they'll make a movie about us?”

“A movie? That is likely an understatement.”

“Yeah. There'll be shows and operas and musicals and books, we'll be all the rage with all the hip young kids.” Shepard stops, then her eyes widen. “Oh my god, think of the kids. It'll be like baby boomers on Stims won't it? A Golden Age for the next generation.”

“They'll certainly have a lot to do. And quite a few people to look up to,” you concede.

Shepard's gaze turns distant, eyes focusing on the future ahead. Whatever she sees there must be truly wondrous, because she smiles her patented disarming smile, and says, “We had a good run, didn't we?”

You spare a glance at her, and wonder just what Shepard's future looks like, who is in it, but it must be beautiful, if she is reacting in such a way. It warms your heart to see how far she has come. An explosion, followed by gunfire, tears through the speakers, shaking the floor with its monstrous sounds, so you wait until the sequence has passed, before you say, “We certainly did,” and then, more quietly, “I love you.”

“I love you too,” Shepard breathes, guided out of the future and into the now. She regards you with wet eyes and a face like a thousand blooming possibilities waiting to be picked, all floating in and out of existence, suspended by silence. The weight of the moment passes over you, silky smooth, a light pressure on your chest to replace breathing and your heartbeat. Shepard hesitates, once again unsure of how to exist in this honeyed fraction of eternity. Then she nudges herself from one plane of being to another, stops straddling the line and plunges into your reality with the honest, white light words, “Will you marry me?”

Now, it seems, it is your turn to be unsure of how to be. Those words mean something in just about any language. Convey lifetimes of emotions, and lives and moments beyond the comprehension of any other. But you cannot reconcile those words to your present. Marriage and you and her. Together as a whole, three words but two people. That seems more like something your past self would become. The you before everything was shattered and the world died. Because you and her fit perfectly back then, sharp edges and rough lines were unheard of, there was no question of existence, you two simply were. Liara and Shepard. That was the beginning and end of everything. But now you are not you, and Shepard is someone who shouldn't be alive anymore but is, some distortion of time forever fracturing the future and present. Can marriage apply to someone who theoretically does not- could not- exist? To you, still finding yourself in the aftermath, still rubbing at new bruises you find smarting your skin and soul?

Maybe it doesn't. Maybe it does not apply to strangers in a state of semi-intimacy, who know everything and nothing about each other. Like their favorite color and which scars looks the loveliest but not what they believe the future holds. People who knew each other once, lost one another, found themselves among stardust and asteroids and tried to build homes out of that. People who were less like homing beacons and more like artillery shells drifting through space. So maybe marriage is like a collision, some ten million years in the making. By the time you reached each other there were so many stories and not enough words to make them tangible. Maybe everything you both have built will be so gloriously annihilated that it will redshift out of existence. Out of this lifetime. Well, it's about time you were selfish. You knew how to heal, even if your were still an infant inside its bandages. You could start again. Want to start again. So you answer, “Yes,” and await the end of everything.

It is silence, the collision, not a kaleidoscope of noise and color. Silence, as the melding of two beings into one comes to messy completion. The untrodden territory is new to you both, now Shepard seems so real to you, so alive and wonderful and positively gorgeous that you take her by her heart and bone marrow and kiss her deeply, fully, like you've just learned how to live and nothing could ever hurt. You make it to bed, amid fumbling fingers and derelict clothing, and you both come so close to touching your old selves the glamor of the experience almost blinds you, fingertips reaching over skin and back in time so that you can taste it all on your tongue and in the spaces between your bones. You are positive you've broken something fundamental to the laws of physics as the feeling of being doubled, new and old, recedes with the moon. You are you, half a stranger, with parts of who you were clinging to your hands like stubborn glitter.

You look at Shepard, asleep on her stomach, imperfectly perfect and yours. Always yours until time caught up with you both, took what it rightfully owned. You trace scars, known and unknown, feel the warmth of her back, the divot of her spine. You love her, and no amount of shame or regret or what ifs could derail this. Even if it took years to heal, even if nothing righted itself until you were nearly dead, and the door to Shepard's heart had been closed for centuries, you would love her, the idea of her, the fact that you knew her at all. Everything about you both was a miracle, perhaps not even that could render proper justice. You could learn anew what had fostered love in the beginning. What there was to love now, grown in the wake of all destruction. The kind of things that would make poets weep at the irrevocable reverence with which you both gazed upon each other. Conventional wisdom holds that nothing can grow in space, nothing can live. It chokes and smothers and tears at the seams, all ugliness and raw absence.

But you can grow flowers, here, in your own little center of the universe. There is fertile ground somewhere in the shared breath of both of you. You could be a garden or a greenhouse, something wholesome and wondrous. You could be groundwork no one could undo, brick and mortar that would survive the death of the universe. You could encase this in titanium and store it for a rainy afternoon. For a couple of ragged people clinging to the coattails of each day, you did just fine. You found each other again. Crushed odds into dust and tossed them out of airlocks without looking back. You weren't alright, not wholly complete, but for the first time, you could see what the end looked like. What your end and her end ran together to become, a mess of half-words and touches and ideals.

Shepard must have watched you for quite some time, because her voice holds no trace of sleep when she says, “Good morning,” so light and beautiful your heart swells.

“Good afternoon, actually,” you correct, lean over to infuse a kiss between her shoulder blades.

Shepard spares a glance at the clock, before she pushes her face into the rumpled pillows. “Care to make it good night?” She offers, arms drawn over her face to block out the light. “I haven't slept that well in years.” She pauses then, her posture caving in on itself. She pulls her face from the plush, stuffed pillows, exhaling abruptly. “About last night, I'm sorry. Not- not about the proposal, but I know I should have had a ring or planned it out, made it something memorable.”

You brush gentle knuckles across her ribs, wait for supernova eyes to match yours, before you say, “None of that matters. You don't need a ring or a grand gesture to impress me. I love you.”

“I know. But you deserve the world.”

“You've already given me the world. Multiple worlds.”

Shepard gives a small, breathy laugh at that, shifting on the bed to face you. “I suppose I did.”

You trace a knotted scar that wobbles its way from her collarbone, over her shoulder, an old wound from younger, less vulnerable years. Years when youth sheathed her heart and her flesh, impervious, untarnished, bullet-proof. “For the record, I think spontaneous gestures are more romantic than planned ones.”

Shepard's smile is a crooked one, a flash of teeth beneath slightly chapped lips. Her fingers run across the hand exploring her clavicle, tracing inane patterns neither of you knew. Perhaps vestiges of the Prothean language, imprinted by the Cipher in an age that seems irreconcilably long ago. “We have time, I guess. To get a ring. Plan everything out, once shit is sorted out.”

“We can only move as fast as our feet, after all,” you say, the echoes of a memory reverberating in your veins. Your mother once told you that, many, many ages ago, when your impatience to improve got the better of you. Your mother was a wise one indeed. If life was a dance, she'd had a long time to practice. And if this life with Shepard was a tango, you both had much to learn.

Shepard's eyes are earnest and open, eyes of space and stars, flecks of golden constellations swimming, swirling. The sunlight catches rambunctious curls, turns dark hair to the color of forests and fresh rains. The colors of home. If you strain your ears, you can hear the city rebuilding outside the walls. Rising from the ashes, beautiful and promising, a hand waiting to be held. Her fingers find the spot upon your own where a ring would go. A promise. Of a lifetime. Of a second. Of the present. Here you both were, two forces of nature, one half a ghost and then some. Colliding in some gorgeous sort of way, the kind of force that starts a universe, or a story. The war was a way to reset. After all, there was hardly anything left to claim history to. So you start anew. You have to, with nothing to cling to.

Maybe it was the destruction of history that allowed this to happen at all. With nothing to drown you, the only thing in the new world to touch is Shepard. To start life with. This world wasn't made for you or her. This world wasn't made for anyone. It was an accident. But you did the best you could, and by the Goddess, were you going to capitalize on it. Shepard is here, and yours, until whoever or whatever is at the end of this decides the afterlife needs a hero too. Or a good drinking buddy. So you'll wait it out, all the bumps and and the plunges, a boat on the fresh, waking sea, a whole new world, a whole new age of exploration. You draw your arms around Shepard's head, pull her close, breath in the cigarette and coffee smell of her skin. Real. Here. Shepard feels the pulse in your wrist, a heartbeat she's pledged herself to.

“Let's make it a goodnight,” you say, to the unbridled grin of Shepard's scarred face, all the promises and failures. All she is. All she isn't. “We've got all the time we need.”


End file.
